Catholic bishops in the US began ceding their teaching authority to fringe groups decades ago. Now that the chickens have come home to roost, a pope has finally stepped in.

The plenary assembly of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops ended Nov. 14 in Baltimore. (Photo by Patrick Semansky/AP)

The moral credibility of Catholic bishops in the United States is in tatters. Even the men who head the country’s nearly 200 dioceses have admitted this.

But don’t be fooled into thinking that this deficit of trust happened all of a sudden.

Certainly, revelations earlier this year surrounding the immoral sexual behavior of Archbishop Theodore McCarrick and the publication last summer of a grand jury report highlighting decades of abuse cover-up in several Pennsylvania dioceses have further strained the Catholic people’s confidence in their pastoral leaders.

But the crisis of episcopal credibility in the United States is tied to something that is deeper and even more damaging than the spasmodic — and, at times, appalling — way the bishops, as a body and as individuals, have reacted to clergy sex abuse. The genesis of this broken trust between U.S. Catholics and their bishops goes back to at least three or more decades.

A botched opportunity to teach and lead

Let us refresh our collective memory, so severely crippled in this on-line age of rapid digital communications when even recent history is easily set aside or forgotten in a mere succession of tweets.

The tale begins in 1981 when the bishops made a confused and very expensive commitment to enter what had already become a rapidly expanding period of satellite and cable telecommunications.

Their episcopal conference, then still a two-pronged organization known as the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the U.S. Catholic Conference (NCCB-USCC) set up something called CTNA, the Catholic Telecommunications Network of America.

The bishops’ effort came at the same time a fully-habited cloistered nun in Alabama named Mother Angelica launched her fledgling Eternal World Television Network (EWTN). But CTNA was doomed from the start, beset by poor planning, lack of clear vision, a tepid response by many bishops and — as almost everyone at the time agreed — its “amateurish” program content.

Fourteen years and 14 million dollars later, the bishops’ national body (now the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops or USCCB) pulled the plug on their telecommunications venture in June 1995 at their spring assembly in Chicago.

An unwitting figure at the heart of the saga

“The bishops might seriously consider doing away with CTNA, terminating the project,” said one of them just before the vote in 1995.

“Mother Angelica’s presence on EWTN is the only Catholic presence that we have nationally. It would be my hope that the bishops’ conference might cooperate more closely with her in the area of television…” the bishop reasoned.

His name was Sean O’Malley, then 51 years old and head of the Massachusetts diocese of Fall River. It was the second of four dioceses O’Malley would eventually go on to lead, the final three of them flashpoints of the unfolding crisis of clergy sexual abuse.

O’Malley — currently the cardinal-archbishop of Boston, a trusted member of Pope Francis’ C9 council of advisors and the president of the Pontifical Commission for the Protection of Minors — probably never foresaw the even greater disaster that would eventually result from the bishops’ decision to abdicate the field of Catholic communications to ETWN.

He, and the other members of the USCCB, likely believed they would be able to work with and influence the tone, content and direction of Mother Angelica’s network.

But that never happened.

It is now clear that it was the first step in ceding their teaching and moral authority to a sarcastic and biting nun who had made herself a watchdog of orthodoxy and routinely criticized Church leaders whom she publicly judged as not quite Catholic enough.

To be quite clear, many bishops — especially early on — were alarmed at what was unfolding.

But they had neither the collective will, nor the vast resources (which Mother Angelica was able to obtain) to put a check on the network.

And, successively, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI reshaped the U.S. episcopacy with men who shared the same mentality and vision of Mother Angelica.

But it’s no small bit of historical irony that Cardinal O’Malley, now considered (perhaps a bit too mythically) as the most credible U.S. bishop in addressing abuse in the Church, should have been one of the leading figures in this saga.

Thanks to EWTN’s now global reach (broadcasting round the clock in more than seven countries, as well as all of Latin America) the credibility of the bishops is at an all-time low.

The generally more traditionalist supporters of the network have soured on bishops that EWTN routinely and mercilessly depicts as weak and unorthodox.

More progressive-minded Catholics who dislike the network, meanwhile, have also lost faith in the bishops for having de facto allowed EWTN — driven by its moralistic, black-and-white, rules-based and clericalist ideology — to become the major media expression of Catholicism in the United States.

Pope Francis puts the brakes on the bishops

So much for the historical backdrop. But it is important to understanding what happened this past week in Baltimore when the USCCB gathered for its annual fall session.

In light of the McCarrick case, the Pennsylvania grand jury report and the unprecedented attack on Pope Francis this past summer by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò (papal nuncio to the United States from 2011-2016), who accused the pope of covering up McCarrick’s misdeeds, the conference agenda aimed at creating protocols of accountability for bishops who have abused people or who protected other clerics that have perpetrated abuse.

But Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, the USCCB president, shocked the bishops and the general public by announcing at the start of the meeting on Monday (Nov. 12) that the Vatican had ordered, just hours earlier, that the conference delay voting on any new abuse protocols.

The directive came from Canadian Cardinal Marc Ouellet, prefect of the Congregation of Bishops, but there is no doubt that it was the pope’s decision.

The current papal nuncio to Washington, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, was also involved in imposing the order, having met with Francis the previous Saturday at the Vatican.

People were stunned and Cardinal DiNardo was visibly annoyed by the development.

The bishops, under more pressure than ever before because of their perceived mishandling of the sex abuse crisis, had been promising U.S. Catholics since last summer that the Baltimore meeting would be a decisive turning point in holding their erring episcopal confréres to account. Now the pope had stopped them in their tracks.

There was a media tidal wave of criticism aimed directly at Pope Francis and Vatican officials.

The pope and his aides were accused of not grasping the seriousness of the abuse crisis. Some even accused Francis of being an autocrat. He certainly had made an unpopular decision, at least in the eyes of people in United States.

The bishops have not always had the pope’s back

Cardinal DiNardo has not made public Cardinal Ouellet’s letter or revealed the reasons the Vatican prefect gave for asking the USCCB to take no binding vote, except to indicate that the Holy See wanted the poll delayed until after February when Pope Francis holds a major summit on sex abuse with the presidents of all the world’s episcopal conferences.

Many have speculated that this was to spare the U.S. bishops (and the Holy See) embarrassment should the Americans’ ratified protocols be out of sync with anything that might be decided in February.

But there would have also been a problem in procedure and mentality had the bishops voted in Baltimore.

Pope Francis had earlier ordered them to make a weeklong retreat (it will be in January) to foster unity among themselves and undergo a period of prayerful discernment on how to respond to this phase of the abuse crisis. The bishops botched this.

The agenda that they were originally to vote on was finalized less than two weeks before their Baltimore gathering. What would be the point to make decisions in November and then do discernment two months later. That would be upside-down.

It’s not an unimportant point. It is plain for all to see that since the abuse crisis first erupted in Louisiana in the 1980s and then exploded in Boston in 2002, the bishops’ conference has reacted in panic and mainly on the advice of lawyers and public relations firms.

As a conference, they have largely adopted band-aid solutions at each and every new stage of the crisis and, as individuals, they have been uneven in applying those remedies.

Then there is the question of Archbishop Viganò’s attack on Francis and his call for the pope to resign because he covered up Archbishop McCarrick’s abuse.

Since late last August when the former papal nuncio released the explosive document, full of unproven accusations (some already debunked) and salacious innuendos, no less than two dozen U.S. bishops have publicly vouched for Viganò’s credibility and called for the accusations to be taken seriously.

Only a couple in that entire group voiced clear and unwavering support of the pope, giving the distinct impression that they stood by the ex-nuncio (some whom he obviously helped be named to their current posts).

Perhaps even worse, the majority of bishops in the United States have either remained silent or have made only vague and tepid professions of loyalty to Francis. They did so as an entire conference in Baltimore in a formal declaration that Cardinal DiNardo read out with about as much emotion as a teacher taking a roll call.

How could any Catholic, and especially Pope Francis, have any degree of confidence in this group of bishops?

A global response in the emerging age of synodality

The Vatican’s decision to intervene in Baltimore has undoubtedly made the stakes much higher for the pope and the presidents of the world’s episocopal conference to chart out clear and decisive action next February when they meet in Rome.

It is more than strange that commentators in the United States who have consistently criticized the country’s bishops for their inability to “police themselves” are now excoriating the pope when he, too, (at least ostensibly) has come to the same conclusion.

They are mistaken those who believe, perhaps out of an innate and misguided sense of “American exceptionalism,” that the U.S. bishops have done the hard laps on dealing with sex abuse and can be the model for other conferences around the globe.

Pope Francis has come late to the game and has been slow to legislate any binding norms or procedures for dealing with abusers and the bishops that protected them.

But the lack of swiftness is not the same as doing nothing. The pope has been unrelenting in looking for a deeper and more global response that gets to the very foundations that have allowed this poison to spread throughout the Church. Band-aid solutions will no longer do.

Francis is an 81-year-old Latin American bishop, but he surely knows better than anyone by now that sexual abuse, whether it has been made public or not, affects every part of the Church in every place on earth. And that’s why he has convened the meeting in February.

His appointment of Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta as adjunct-secretary at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (CDF) is proof of this.

Scicluna, who is one of the most widely respected and competent Church officials to combat abuse and the abusers, will be a major player in February.

Does this seemingly centralized approach make a sham of the pope’s insistence on a more synodal and decentralized Church, in which local bishops are entrusted with decision-making authority to deal with situations peculiar to their territory?

Not at all.

Sex abuse is not particular to only certain geographical areas. It is global. There must be basic criteria and a common understanding that unites the entire universal Church.

Then each episcopal conference will have to discern the best and most effective ways to implement the global standards at the local level.

As I’ve warned before, the road to building a synodal and de-centralized Church is going to be long and full of countless obstacles.

It will probably take two or three generations before we have a sufficient number of bishops who are capable of actually leading this transformation.

The worldwide episcopacy at present is distinguished, at best, by mediocrity. And too many bishops, like those in the United States, have lost their credibility and moral authority.

No one can blame Pope Francis for that — at least not him alone. The current mess was made by a couple of men who, in the many years before him, sat in the Chair of Peter.

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